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Category: It Was Awesome

Cian was eating. He’s just woken from his morning nap, and I was breastfeeding him, scrolling through something on my phone (US Weekly? Facebook? Who knows, but it was compelling). I feel guilty when I do this, not just because I’m trying and miserably failing in my attempt to cut the umbilical phone cord, as it were, but also because all of the parenting websites (which I read, on my phone, probably while nursing) tell me that all I should be doing while my baby feeds is stroking the little stubby tufts of hair on his head and gazing at him adoringly. Never mind that when you nurse a kid a half-dozen times a day there’s only so much hair tuft-adoring you can do. It’s not like there’s a lot of it to adore anyway, you know? So never mind that. I figured babies don’t mind not being stared at while they’re not paying attention because babies are usually awesome. And probably not vain. But I was sitting on the bed this time. It was quiet, and the girls were playing together in the…

Something happened when Cian turned five weeks. He started staring at us with wide eyes, analyzing the shape of our hairlines, the shadows of our ears. Then his eyes, travelling over our faces, would unexpectedly meet ours (though they were there, of course, rapt, waiting for him all along), and his head would suddenly rear back, his eyes growing wide, as if thinking, “Oh, hello! Wasn’t expecting to see you there!” And then the smiles started. The SMILES. The gummy, open-mouthed, holy-moley-ain’t-it-great-to-be-alive smiles that transform his whole face and turn us into blubbering globs of cooing nonsense. I don’t want to tell you that David gets most of the smiles. Because, you know, he’s the one up all night, bleary-eyed and barely conscious, changing poopy diapers and breastfeeding until his boobs fall off. Oh, wait. Something else happened at the five-week mark, too. Something remarkable. Something that would have had me turning cartwheels out of our room and into Cian’s, if I actually knew how to turn a cartwheel, which I don’t, which I’ve…

Note: My apologies in advance, you guys. Might want to get two cups of coffee for this one, because it’s really, really long. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I talk a lot when I get excited. Two years ago, I decided to take the challenge of National Novel Writing Month–NaNoWriMo–and write a 50,000 page book during the month of November. I was writing already, but I needed a focus, something that was so big of a challenge (a novel in a month? Why not?!) it seemed almost impossible. Quinn wasn’t yet six months old. I think she was sleeping through the night. All I remember is being really, really tired, sitting in front of the computer until about 11:30 every night, and the gigantic mound of laundry piled up on the couch beside me. The end result, which made me so happy to complete, was straight-up terrible. The book, I mean, not the laundry. The laundry’s always terrible. One year later, after stripping that glob of words down to its basic framework and building it back up to about 70,000…